The present disclosure relates to a sheet of paper, and application programs.
The use of small devices such as mobile phones comprising processors is growing rapidly. Despite this development, paper is still widely used for making notes and will be for the foreseeable future. It has been possible for a long time to scan paper documents to store their contents in data files.
Most scanners for documents are fairly large and therefore stationary. On the other hand they provide relatively unified images of sheets of paper, since the distance from the imaging unit, the orientation of the paper while scanning, and the light conditions can be controlled to a large extent.
More and more small electronic devices, such as mobile telephones, comprise digital camera units, and the quality of these camera units is steadily improving, so that for example mobile telephones today are effectively digital cameras.
An application program, or app, enabling the editing of photos of paper sheets taken by means of the camera of a mobile phone was recently launched by the Japanese company Kokuyo. This app is arranged to enable a user to capture an image of a sheet of paper. Markers in the corners of the sheet are used to determine the sheet's orientation and adjust it within the image. Other markers can be provided to indicate a folder in which the sheet should be stored. Further, the user can provide markers by coloring predefined areas in the corners of the sheet.
Using markers only in the corners of the sheets limits the types of corrections that may be performed on the image, and their accuracy. For example, a fold or a crease in the center of the sheet may not be detected at all, or its correction may be impossible to determine correctly. It may also be that portions of the text having a very low contrast to the background may be lost in the imaging, without the user being able to tell from the resulting image that something is missing.